Changeling

by David Wood

  From his research notes, it was clear that Roche believed the vault would be found somewhere on the island of Sicily, but he had little evidence to back this supposition up. Ever the conspiracy theorist, he claimed that there had been a systematic effort, either by the Changelings, or by the acolytes of the Society of Syracuse—or perhaps both, though for very different reasons—to erase any mention of the vault’s location from the historical record. Jade would be starting her search from square one, but she was counting on her lack of preconceived notions to give her a fresh perspective. Maybe Roche, in looking too hard for what he expected to find, had overlooked some important clue.

  She began looking, as she almost always did, at a museum—specifically the Paolo Orsi Regional Archaeological Museum. Given the rich history of Sicily, and specifically Syracuse, it was not surprising that the city hosted one of the premiere archaeological institutions in Europe. The museum complex—situated on the edge of the historic Villa Londolina, where ongoing excavations continued to provide new insights into the Greek and Roman period—was unusual and a bit anachronistic. A top down view revealed a geometric design of conjoined hexagonal cells, a decidedly modern design for a repository of history. Archimedes would probably have approved, but despite his status as Syracuse’s favorite son, there was very little information about him in the Orsi. After two hours of touring the facility, Jade headed to the next museum on the list, which in hindsight, should have been at the top: the Arkimedeion.

  The reason the Arkimedeion had not been her first stop was that it was not a history museum, but rather a science museum, showcasing the mathematical discoveries and inventions of Archimedes. According to a tourist guide website, the Arkimedeion had only been open a few years and the reviews described an ambitious tourist attraction that fell short of its promise. Jade’s hopes were not high as she and Kellogg made the trip by taxi to Ortigia, the small island district where the Arkimedeion was located. The museum occupied an elegant stone building on the edge of a cobblestone piazza, at the center of which was a marvelous fountain with a sculpted mermaid—possibly meant to represent the Roman goddess Diana—and a child riding on the back of a large fish. The setting would have been more impressive if not for the fact that stone buildings were ubiquitous in the Old World, and you couldn’t throw a Frisbee in Italy without it splashing down in a fountain. With appropriately low expectations, Jade headed toward the front entrance while Kellogg paid their taxi driver.

  A smiling middle-aged man at the ticket counter greeted her in Italian. He was handsome enough, but like elegant buildings and fountains, that was nothing remarkable. Jade peered at his named badge and then addressed him in English. “Sorry, Paolo. I don’t speak Italian.”

  “Ah, scusi. Fortunately, I speak your language well enough. And you are also fortunate that the museo is having free entry to beautiful ladies today.”

  “How lucky for me.”

  “Si.” He extended a hand like a game show host. Jade noticed a glint of gold on his pinky finger, a signet ring with an emblem she couldn’t quite make out. “And we are very slow today, so it will my pleasure to give you a tour.”

  The door opened and Kellogg strolled in. Jade turned to him. “Good news, honey. Free admission today. And a guided tour.”

  Paolo’s smile fell but he nodded gamely and gestured to the entrance. “Please, this way.”

  Atash Shah watched Jade and Kellogg make their way into the museum from the shelter of a black Volkswagen van, parked on the far side of the fountain. Despite the dark tinted window, which ably concealed the six men in the passenger seats behind him from outside scrutiny, Shah felt exposed. Conspicuous. But if their quarry had noticed the vehicle tailing them through the city, they gave no outward sign.

  “We can take them here,” Gabrielle said.

  “In broad daylight?” Shah shook his head. “It’s too public.”

  “Look around. There’s no one in there. We won’t get a better chance.” Her eyes flitted ever so slightly, looking over her shoulder at the men seated behind them, the implicit message: Send them in.

  He understood why she wanted him to give the order. The men behind them, young Muslim immigrants who had answered Shah’s call to arms, needed to hear it from him, their leader, not from a woman and an infidel at that.

  He had issued his summons in one of the Internet chatrooms where would-be jihadists flirted endlessly with the prospect of joining al Quaeda or ISIL. Most were poseurs, unwilling to make good on their boasts. Some were probably undercover policeman—FBI or Interpol—though they were pretty easy to unmask. But there were always a few who were willing, eager even, to embrace martyrdom. The trick was in separating the wheat from the chaff.

  These six had come from Paris, carrying their own illegally obtained weapons, ready to do whatever he asked of them.

  And Shah had to be the one to ask it of them.

  He drove the van around the fountain and pulled up in front of the entrance, close enough that no one looking out from the surrounding buildings would see them bring their hostages out the front. Then, he turned to face his holy warriors. “Cover all the exits so they can’t slip away. And remember. We need them alive.”

  Shah wondered if they heard the fear in his voice. Would they see through him? See how weak he was? Did they know that the real reason he wanted them to take hostages was that he was afraid to give the order to kill?

  If they doubted him, they did not show. One by one, they filed out of the van and headed toward the entrance to the Arkimedeion.

  Gabrielle’s hand close over his in a reassuring squeeze, and Shah felt some of the fear slip away.

  “How about this one,” Jade said, gesturing to an exhibit that, if the poster was to be believed, was a reconstruction of Archimedes’ “heat ray.” One of his more famous—and probably apocryphal—inventions, the heat ray was an array of parabolic mirrors that the inventor had supposedly used to set enemy ships on fire in Syracuse harbor.

  “So sorry,” Paolo said. “Is not working right now.”

  “What a surprise,” Jade muttered, sharing a knowing glance with Kellogg. It was not the first time their guide had said those words.

  The heat ray simulations, like several other displays and dioramas in the supposedly interactive museum, was currently closed for repairs. Jade now understood the reason for the negative reviews on the travel guide website. It wasn’t that the museum was run down. In fact, the space was bright and welcoming, with vibrant colors utterly unlike the subdued earth tones of the Archaeology Museum. It wasn’t really even that so many exhibits were out-of-order. Rather, the most disappointing thing about the Arkimedeion was how it failed to live up to its potential. An entire museum dedicated to one of the greatest minds in scientific history, and nothing worked. It was hard to believe in the legend of Archimedes when the reproductions of his most famous inventions were non-functional.

  “No matter,” Paolo said, waving a dismissive hand at the broken exhibit. “You will like the stomachion.”

  “With a name like that, I’m sure I’ll love it.”

  Paolo led them up the stairs to another bright room with more vivid primary colors, and not much else. He gestured to the table in the center, which displayed a rectangular mosaic composed of differently colored triangles.

  “That’s the… um…stomachatron?”

  “Stomachion,” Paolo repeated. He went to the table and began picking up the individual triangles and rearranging them. “Is an ancient Greek game. You create different shapes. Animals. Houses. Anything the mind imagines.”

  Jade now saw that the almost psychedelic wallpaper in the room was actually made up of hundreds of different variations on the arrangement of the geometric tiles. “It’s like a tangram puzzle.”

  “Si, si. Archimedes, he uses it to test complex mathematical ideas. He wrote book, all about how he uses stomachion, but…” He shrugged. “We have only part. The rest is lost.”

  “Speaking of lost books, can you te
ll us anything about the Vault of Archimedes?”

  Jade thought she saw surprise flicker across the museum guide’s face. “Vault?”

  “With a timelock that only opens once every thousand years.”

  Paolo’s smile returned. “Ah, a new story. I have never heard this one before.”

  “I think we can take that as a ‘no,’ then,” Kellogg said.

  Paolo opened his mouth to reply, but then looked away suddenly. “Ah, more guests. Please, enjoy the stomachion. Perhaps, you can tell me more about this Vault before you go.”

  “Actually,” Jade said, “I think we’ve seen enough.”

  She followed Paolo out onto the balcony overlooking the guest lobby, but stopped short when she caught a glimpse of the two men who were just starting up the stairs. Her instincts screamed an alarm.

  It was not merely that the two men with dark complexions and full beards seemed to fit perfectly the stereotype of what she imagined their attackers in Scotland must have looked like under their ski mask. Looks could certainly be deceiving. Rather, it was the none-too subtle aura of menace that radiated from them. They both looked ready to explode into violence.

  Paolo called out to them in his typically friendly manner but before he could finish his greeting, they reached him and brushed past him like he wasn’t even there.

  Jade shrank back into the stomachion room. “Company’s here. We need to find a back door.”

  Kellogg stared back, dumbfounded, so Jade grabbed his arm and dragged him toward the exit. His reflex to resist slowed her down just enough to allow the two bearded men to reach the landing at almost the same instant she and Kellogg stepped out. The reaction was instantaneous. The gazes of the two men fixed on Jade like a missile-lock.

  “Run!” she shouted, and then without waiting to see if Kellogg would follow suit, she spun on her heel and sprinted away, heading deeper into the exhibits. After a few seconds of searching on the run, she spied a red exit sign on the ceiling. Unlike several of the other signs she had passed, this one did not point to the stairs behind them, but to a destination somewhere further inside the museum. Fire stairs, or perhaps an exterior fire escape in the rear of the building. Jade swerved toward the sign and then glanced over her shoulder to see how close the pursuit was.

  Too close.

  Although Jade was a good ten yards ahead of the closest assailant, Kellogg’s earlier hesitation had put him within their reach. In the instant she looked back, Jade saw the lead pursuer reaching out to snag hold of Kellogg’s collar.

  Without stopping, Jade snatched up a gold-colored sphere—about the size and weight of a bowling ball—and spun it around, heaving it like an over-sized Olympic shot put. As she released it, she shouted, “Duck!”

  The warning was not only unnecessary but overly optimistic. The sphere arced through the air with agonizing slowness, and then, as gravity overcame what little inertia Jade had been able to give it, dropped suddenly, almost straight down, to strike the ground a few feet to Kellogg’s left with a resounding thump. After releasing the sphere, Jade’s own momentum carried her completely around, and for a moment, it was all she could do to stay on her feet and not go careening into the rest of the geometric display.

  Nevertheless, the attempt was not entirely futile. The two men hesitated, prepared to take evasive action if needed, giving Kellogg a few precious seconds’ lead. Jade got back on an even keel, and with Kellogg now beside her, sprinted in the direction indicated by the exit sign. They rounded a corner and Jade saw, about fifty feet away, a metal door marked with the words “Fire Exit” in both English and Italian.

  Jade’s flickering glimmer of hope was extinguished as the door suddenly swung open to reveal two more bearded men.

  Great, Jade thought. Reinforcements.

  The surprise of the two men at discovering the fleeing figures charging headlong toward them barely gave Jade enough time to avoid a collision. She veered to the right, and then using the wall like a swimmer making the turn at the end of a lap, rebounded back the way they had come, snaring Kellogg’s arm in the process and whipping him around.

  The abrupt reversal caught the two pursuing men completely off guard. One of them made a half-hearted attempt to tackle Jade as she shot by, but Jade just lowered her head and plowed through like a football player charging the scrimmage line. She made glancing contact and felt a sharp pain in her scalp as the man’s hands snagged a few strands of her hair, and then she was past them both, running at full speed back toward the distant landing. Kellogg likewise made it past the two men, slipping between them with unexpected gracefulness.

  Jade’s dismay at realizing that the odds against them had doubled since the confrontation in Scotland was at least partially offset by the fact that, unlike the cramped tunnels in the fogou, their assailants were behind them and there was plenty of room to maneuver. But as she reached the landing, the balance tilted against her once more. Two more men stood in the reception lobby, temporarily waylaid by an extremely agitated Paolo. One of them looked up, spotted her, and cried out in alarm.

  Jade looked around frantically for some other avenue of escape. Kellogg skidded to a stop beside her, likewise searching for an alternate exit but there was nowhere else to go. Then Jade spotted the golden sphere she had thrown earlier, rolling aimlessly toward them.

  “I hope second time’s the charm,” she muttered as she reached down and gave it a shove toward the stairwell. The orb cracked loudly on the first step, bounced slightly, cracked again on the next tread, picking up speed and energy as it descended one step at a time. “Go!”

  The rolling orb did not appear especially menacing but the two men coming up the stairs balked like it was the rolling boulder from an Indiana Jones movie. Paolo still shouting angrily at the intrusion as he gave chase, broke into a smile at the strange sight. He raised his fist in the air and shook it. “Si! Archimedes would be proud.”

  The cascading sphere was just enough of a distraction to allow Jade and Kellogg to close with the men on the stairs at the midpoint. Jade worked all the angles and didn’t care for her chances of bulldozing past the two, so instead, she planted a hand on the rail and vaulted over the side of the stairs. It was an impulsive decision, and as she arced up and over the bannister, and realized just how much space there was between her and the first floor, she instantly regretted it, but there was no turning back. The floor rushed up at her, and then before she was completely ready, she landed.

  The impact sent jolts of pain up her legs, but she managed to stay loose, letting her bent knees absorb some of the shock. A vague memory of someone—probably Maddock—explaining parachute jumping techniques prompted her to lean sideways and curl into a ball. It must have been the right thing to do because the landing was not nearly as bad as she thought it would be, and a moment later, she was back on her feet and staring up at the astounded men on the stairs, which included Kellogg.

  “You staying?”

  Her shout snapped Kellogg out of his amazed stupor and he plowed forward, slamming into his closest assailant and sending him tumbling backward in a flail of arms and legs. Jade whirled around looking for the exit. Between her and it stood Paolo and an array of strange-looking devices—scale models of Archimedes’ siege engines and other inventions.

  The sharp report of a pistol startled Jade. She ducked reflexively behind one of the contraptions and looked up, trying to see which of the men had taken the shot. It was impossible to tell since all of them, except for the one Kellogg had knocked down, were now on the stairs and brandishing guns.

  It might have been just a warning shot, but it was a message Jade couldn’t ignore. She could outrun the men, but reaching the exit would require her to outrun bullets. A lot of them. Kellogg was even closer to the shooters. If they unleashed a fusillade, he would be cut down instantly.

  A memory of what had happened in the fogou returned to her. When retreat had not worked, she had gone on the offensive. Attacked and won.

  But those
men hadn’t been carrying guns.

  A nearby replica—a full-scale model of a scorpion ballista, a giant crossbow artillery piece on wooden wheels, which the ancient Greeks and Romans had used to hurl three foot long iron bolts across long distances—gave her an idea. It was a crazy idea, but maybe just crazy enough to work.

  She wheeled the scorpion around so that the business end was facing the foot of the stairs, and raised a hand above the release lever. She knew the men were watching her, hoped they realized what she was attempting. Her insane plan depended on that.

  Kellogg reached the foot of the stairs and headed her way. She waited a moment longer for the gunmen to get there.

  “Down!” Even as she shouted the warning, her hand striking the release trigger, Jade spun around, ready to dash past Paolo and sprint for the exit.

  There was a loud crack, like a giant mousetrap snapping shut, and Jade felt the air shudder as the scorpion’s torsion springs released their pent up energy and propelled the payload across the exhibit hall. An instant later, there was another sharp cracking noise as the bolt penetrated the wall plaster.

  The discharge shocked Jade into momentary paralysis. Her intent had been to bluff the gunmen with the ancient weapon, get them to dive for cover in order to buy Kellogg and her the precious seconds they needed to reach the door. She was counting on their instinct for self-preservation to override the obvious knowledge that there was no way on earth a museum replica would be fully functional.

  It was impossible to know if the bluff would have worked, but the actual scorpion bolt striking the wall was considerably more persuasive. The gunmen all vanished, ducking behind the balustrade.

  She turned to Paolo. “That works?”

  He gave a guilty shrug then waved urgently. “Come. This way. Follow me.”

  Shah jolted at the loud report. The heavy stone walls of the Arkimedeion building muffled the sound, but there was no doubt in his mind about what he had just heard.